Friday, 14 June 2013

WHITMAN'S WILD CHILDREN: THE HEADPRESS REVIEW

Walt Whitman is a
great place to start any examination of the Beat poets. Ginsberg
acknowledges his debt explicitly in his wonderful “A Supermarket in
California”. The
liberating flow of Whitman's American free verse influenced Ginsberg even more than his status as an emerging 19th century gay icon, but
there was also a sense, that carries through in Ginsberg, of Whitman's importance as a putative man of the streets, constantly out
among the public, engaged with and writing about ordinary people, to the extent of
his visiting Civil War battlefields where he comforted the wounded boys.
Sadly, given such a good starting point, Cherkowski’s idea of “man of the streets” may be more an image
of a proto-hippie Walt cruising the docks for willing sailors. But love beads were never a part of Whitman’s accessorizing, not even when his
hair was long.

Actually, Whitman
might be a role model for Cherkowski himself, because this book could easily have been subtitled “Song of Myself”. It's a kind of Neeli in Wonderland, as it
were, and sometimes this preoccupation with self is downright
hilarious. Cherkowski tells us Ginsberg’s first words on meeting him were
“You’re fat”, and Neeli riposted “You’re old”. He then
reports, deadpan, “Things were never smooth between us after that”.
Johnson shat on Boswell from far greater heights without
creating undue bumps in their relationship!

The high point of
Neeli’s life appears to be when his own poetry is praised by some
youngsters who mistake him, in his beads and buttons, for Ginsberg himself, or maybe
when he beats the great man at Trivial Pursuit, which turns out to be
one of Ginsberg’s favourite pastimes, if not a metaphor for Beat poetry.

It might just be a metaphor for this book however, for it really is a Beatnik Trivial Pursuit game
between covers. We know the Beats have been turned into an industry, a marketing concept if not gimmick, and there
is a lot of mileage in constantly recreating a neighbourhood tour of
San Francisco in the late 50s, or the Village in the 60s. Hell,
Michael McClure (one of the 12 poets discussed here), always adept
at riding the waves toward the next celebrity or grant, once wrote a
book called Scratching The Beat Surface. That seems deep by
Neeli’s standards.

As a critic, Neeli
is a fine tour guide.He makes no bones in refusing to make judgements about Harold Norse, who deserves close examination, not least for his influence. But when I wrote Norse's obit back in 2009, I mentioned it was hard not to make him sound like a literary Zelig to the Beats, and I wonder if that is a role which might have been inherited. Neeli gets overcome by the faux
sentimentality of Jack Micheline, just gives up and lets it all wash
over him. When he’s asked to review John Wieners’ Selected Poems, he’s again simply overcome with feelings, yet actually his take on this
unjustly neglected poet is probably the best chapter in the book. And its
nice to see attention paid again to people like Philip Lamantia.

Otherwise, there is
far better stuff out there on the major subjects: Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti,
Bukowski. Neeli says Buk “didn’t buy the Eisenhower 50s, didn’t
buy the Kennedy 60s” but misses the point: that was when Buk did his
best writing, and when Buk did buy into the Reagan 80s, he lurched
into self-parody. Of course, self-parody is a staple of the Beats,
and Gregory Corso’s ever-inventive riffs are the other highlight
here. Corso tells him: “I’m the elder now. A daddy. You who do
so love the Gregory got the goodie gumdrops from me.” It sounds like the sort of thing Corso might say. Then Neeli,
calling him a pied piper, marches off with Corso through the streets
of North Beach, reminding me of nothing as much as a happy Boswell.

The other link to
Whitman, which Neeli ignores, is that Walt was a major league mama’s
boy, sleeping at the foot of her bed long into adulthood. This problematic close relationship with mothers is a
theme that runs through the Beat poets, most notably Ginsberg and Kerouac. And so
with Neeli. When he takes 250 mils of bad acid in 1978 what does he do?
He calls mom, and she advises him to find Lawrence Ferlinghetti! Which despite the tripping he does, but by the time he does Ferlinghetti is sitting in a café reading the New York Times. Far out!
Maybe Neeli’s Mom could have drawn him a map, and perhaps Neeli would have got us to Ferlinghetti sometime before disco became king.

Whitman's Wild Children: Portraits of 12 Poets

by Neeli Cherkowski

Steerforth Press (South Royalton, Vermont) 1999

ISBN 9781883642860 $18 (UK£12.00)

NOTE: A somewhat different version of this review appeared in Headpress 20.

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